Germany has abandoned the criminal proceedings against the second in command of the Swiss intelligence, accused by Berlin of having authorized an operation of espionage against the German tax collection service.
A year ago, Germany launched an unprecedented investigation into three senior officers of the Swiss intelligence agency, the Federal Intelligence Service (NDB).
The investigation was initiated on suspicion that Swiss officials had planned an espionage operation against German tax investigators who were investigating the activities of Swiss banks. The investigation started three months after the German authorities arrested a Swiss intelligence officer, "Daniel M.", for practicing espionage on German soil.
The German government believes that billions of euros have been deposited by its citizens in banking institutions in European tax havens such as Liechtenstein, Switzerland or Munich.
In the last ten years, German authorities have resorted to the corruption of informers in offshore banks to acquire internal documents revealing the identity of German citizens who hide their money in foreign bank accounts.
It is estimated that from the 2006, the German authorities have paid the informers about a hundred million dollars, with the proceeds collected from taxes and fines. But the Swiss government has strongly criticized Berlin for encouraging employees in the Swiss banking sector to steal internal company information that often violates the strict privacy laws of Switzerland.
It is believed that the NDB was tasked by the Swiss government to monitor the commitment of German tax fraud investigators to approach potential whistleblowers working in the Swiss banking sector.
The man identified as "Daniel M." seems to be one of the many Swiss spies who have gathered information on the activities of German tax investigators. For a while it seemed that German counterintelligence officials intended to address Paul Zinniker, deputy director of the NDB. They claimed that Zinniker was the main support officer of the operation in which he was participating "Daniel M." when he was arrested in Germany in the 2017.
According to the Germans, it was Zinniker who conceived the operation in the 2011. But on Monday a spokesman for the German federal prosecutor told the Swiss news agency that Berlin sent the case back to Zinniker in June.
The revelation came less than 48 hours after a Sunday report by the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung claimed that the charges against Zinniker would lapse. According to the German federal prosecutor's office, the case against the Swiss intelligence officer was abandoned due to the lack of cooperation from the Swiss authorities, which made it impossible to prove that Zinniker was actually the mind of the espionage operation against Berlin .